Tech Journal: Instapaper Vs. Pocket

Applications like Instapaper and Pocket are the two most popular apps in the “Read Later” category and are changing the way we consume online content, says Amit Agarwal

It was a five-hour flight to New Delhi and I didn’t have enough reading material on my iPad. At the airport, I could see dozens of interesting articles on my Twitter timeline and Google Reader, but it was nearly impossible to open and save them in the 30-minutes I had before boarding the flight.

Instead of opening these stories one-by-one in the web browser, I forwarded the links to add@getpocket.com. Then I launched the Pocket app and, within minutes, the entire text of all the articles was downloaded on my iPad. I could now read mid-air even though the airplane had no Wi-Fi.

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The “Save Now, Read Later” category of apps is changing the way we consume online content, especially long-form content that we don’t want to just skim through. You’ll probably be too busy to read an 8,000-word story at work, but you can save it on your phone or tablet and read it later during your commute home.

Instapaper and Pocket are the two most popular apps in the “Read Later” category and they have lot in common. You can add any web page to your reading list (the queue) and the service will save an uncluttered version of that page to your account. You can catch up with your reading list on the web or your mobile – both Instapaper and Pocket offer “official” apps for iOS and Android devices, though you can use them on other mobile platforms as well through third-party apps.

The big advantage with using an app is that it lets you read saved stories even without the Internet. You can add stories to your reading list by using the bookmarklets or browser add-ons, or you can simply email the web page links to a specified email address and the underlying web page will automatically get saved to your reading list.

Instapaper and Pocket are also integrated with quite a few mobile apps – like Flipboard, Reeder, Zite, Tweetdeck – and you can save web pages to your reading list directly from any of these apps. In the case of Android, the apps add themselves to the system-wide sharing menu (or Intents), so you can add web pages to your reading list from most reading apps on your device.

The services have unique features. Instapaper can automatically send your reading list to your Kindle reader as an ebook. Pocket recently released a native app for the Mac that is much like the web version but works outside the browser.

Pocket uses a magazine-style layout to display the list of your saved articles, which is easier to scan than the text-only list displayed in Instapaper. The visual layout is particularly helpful when you have put lot of videos in the “watch later” queue. Pocket lets you organize stories using tags (much like Gmail), while Instapaper offers folders.

The other difference is in the pricing. Pocket apps are free but Instapaper charges $3.99 for the iOS version and $2.99 for the Android app. There’s a search button in the Instapaper app but you have to become a subscriber – at $1 per month – to search through your bookmarked items. The free Pocket apps have built-in search, though there’s no option to search through the story content.

I have been an Instapaper user for more than two years but I moved to Pocket in recent months because of the visually-appealing design and better support for web videos. While the two services mostly work as advertised, there seems to be no convincing reason to pay for Instapaper apps when Pocket, backed by VC funding, offers something similar (and better) for free.

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